Beowulf's Children Read online

  "No humans to see it from down here. Maybe it blinded a few grendels." Gloria was almost behind him, her hands toying with his hair. "Is that really your wish?"

  To see it myself! "I wish... that tonight was Fantasy Night," he lied.

  "It's any night you want," she whispered. She reached up, turned his face with her fingertips, and kissed him blisteringly.

  His hands found the warm, soft places on her body, and they sank down together by the firelight. There was no fumbling; latches and straps unbuckled as if by magic.

  If anyone saw them there, no one commented. There were no gawkers as their bodies, gilded by the light of embers and twin moons, entwined for almost an hour before release finally calmed them both.

  They cuddled for a time, whispering, then, suddenly freezing, scrambled for a thermal sleeping bag.

  Then there was silence, save for the distant sound of water, and the call of some far-off night creature. No one heard. The fire consumed its last morsels of fuel, and began to fade. No one saw.

  The only eyes that remained open were grendel eyes. Open, staring, glass eyes.

  Dead eyes.

  Eyes that saw everything, and felt nothing at all.

  Twenty-four years before...

  It should have been dead of night. Her body knew that, even though the whole world glared silver-blue in the light overhead. The grendel had tried looking near it, and had been blind for most of a day. Blind with the agony in her head, eyes that saw only at the edges; blind long enough to die, but the lake monster hadn't killed her.

  Since then she had not looked up, though she would wonder about that spear of fire in the sky for the rest of her life.

  For a long, long time there had been nothing but the hideous pain in her head. Now the agony in her head was receding. Now she could remember that she was hungry. Feeble with hunger. How could she feed herself if she was too feeble to fight?

  And how was it that she had never had such a notion until now? She had never fought the lake monster, but hunger would never have stopped her. Only fear.

  At the southern end of a vast lake, where the water emptied out into a sluggish muddy river, there the grendel had lived as a swimmer. There she had first drawn breath, and killed a sibling for food. She began to remember, now, how hungry she had always been. She and her sibs had fought for room to swim and room to run, for space to hold their own swimmers, and had eaten what they killed, until only three or four remained. She remembered the sister who had challenged the monster of the lake, and died almost before the grendel could turn to see.

  The lake monster lurked along the west side of the lake, where pebbly mudflat gave way to horsemane trees. Farther south the forest was different, a tangled mass of vines and hives and trees that grew like puzzles and snares. The lake monster lurked sometimes in the horsemanes, but never in the tangle forest. And south of the tangle forest was where the grendel and her sisters lived, and a myriad of their spawn.

  Her sisters died, and there were only the grendel and her own spawn. And still it was not enough. She'd grown too large. Eating her own spawn felt wrong, repulsive, and that wasn't the worst of it. She and they didn't have the room. If they tried to spread out, the lake monster took them. No room to feed, not enough moss and insects for the spawn, meant that they never grew large enough to feed their mother. She had to move.

  Here the muddy river flowed into the lake. By the silver-blue light of a thing in the sky that fit no pattern at all, she looked south. The patterns linking in her mind now showed her how strange it was that she had ever come here alive. She hadn't had the sight, then. Wherever she looked, then, was only fear, no patterns at all.

  She'd seen how fast the lake monster was in the water.

  And on land... but not the southwest shore. Something so peculiar had happened there that the images remained even now...

  It had only been a little time since the change, for her and for the sister she must drive away. Her sister, beaten, had retreated to land. She had crossed that patch of pebbly mud and into the tangled forest beyond. No web of plants could stop the juggernaut that was a grendel. Her sister might find new turf.

  The grendel watched her from the southern shore. Food was scarce, and there was the lake monster too.

  Her sister was in the tangled trees, and into some kind of dust or mist. She screamed once, and burst out of the trees in a spray of wood and vines. Even the lake monster had never moved that fast. The grendel watched her streak down the pebbly mudflat at the head of a dust-cloud comet.

  The lake monster lifted her terrible head—and let her pass.

  She was nearly out of sight when she tumbled to a stop. She seemed little more than a heap of bones. The grendel had never dared go for a closer look.

  And beyond that place was the lake monster's favorite lurk.

  No, the west shore was impossible even to the senseless being that the grendel had once been. The route around the east shore was twice as far, twice the distance in which the lake monster could find her...

  She must have had just a trace of pattern-making ability, even then.

  She had waited for a hard rain, then gone wide around the east shore. Prey was fast and wary. On speed it could be caught. When the rain stopped she must enter the lake to shed the heat, and out of the water before the lake monster could come—

  And so she had lived until she reached the river inlet.

  The river was what she sought. She had arrived starving, but bottom feeders had fed her for many days. Then came a sickness in her guts, that moved into her head and inflated. For days she had known nothing but the pain in her head.

  And now she felt cold and weird, and her bones were stretching her skin taut, and her mind was making patterns.

  Way down there in silver-blue light: her own patch of water and land, with too little food for herself or her spawn. Probably the lake monster had already cleaned them out. Only one thing had been desirable about that place. There she could taste the lake monster in the water, and gain some sense of where she was.

  Closer: the lake to her left, and on her right the pebbly mud, and the tangled wood where her sister had turned to fog at a speed-enhanced run.

  Closer yet: more pebbly mud and horsemanes behind, and one huge old horsemane very near the water. The lake monster spent most of her time in the water offshore, but when the woods were wet they could shield her too. Grendel spawn could turn to grendels anywhere in the lake, and their surprise could be brief and intense when the lake monster burst from the trees.

  Here: she could see muddy river and know the food beneath. The river would bring bottom feeders. She could eat now... and the lake monster would taste her anywhere in the lake, and know she was here. If she had seen patterns then, she would not have come here.

  But she saw another pattern now.

  The grendel bore her hunger. She watched the woods and the water. Of prey she saw no sign, and no sign of the lake monster. The silver spear of light failed to rise, but the strangeness of her world did not go away.

  And so a day passed, and a night.

  At midmorning of the following day, the grendel began to walk toward one great horsemane isolated on the mud.

  No sign of the lake monster.

  At a moment that was nothing but guesswork, the grendel began to run.

  This was the first puzzle she had ever solved, and she had no faith in it at all. She ran, but she was not on speed. When a wave moved where no wave should be, terror and vindication surged and then she was on speed. She was skating on slick mud, her legs a blur, homing on the one isolated tree in a plume of mud and gravel.

  The lake monster came out of the water, screamed challenge, and was on speed.

  The grendel veered right and dug in. She'd pass the tree on the right. If the lake monster came straight at her, hit her broadside, she would be torn, smashed, dead. She could see, feel her own death in the pattern! But a notch more speed changed that, pulled her ahead, and now the lake monster would hit the tree.

  The lake monster saw it. Veered left. She'd strike the grendel after she passed the tree.

  Hah! The grendel veered left. She missed the tree by a toenail's width, just behind the lake monster's spiked tail. The lake monster was turning in a spew of gravel and dust, but falling behind for all that.

  It slowed her for only a moment. She had been eating while sickness melted the flesh from her daughter.

  There was dust blowing out of the tangle forest as the grendel swept past them, burning inside, her enemy far too close behind her. But the lake monster swept through the dust, and the dust followed her like a comet tail.

  Enough! The grendel veered out over the water. She could run on water if she ran fast enough, but the speed was broiling her from inside. She looked back once, and saw what she had hoped for. She ducked, and smashed into the water, and sank, cooling.

  She lifted her snorkel. Then, cautiously, her eyes.

  The lake monster was a comet of dust running straight at her across the water.

  If the lake monster dived now she'd be free of the fog and the heat within, but the grendel would have her. The lake monster didn't dive. Probably she never thought of it. When she stopped, she was invisible in a restless dark cloud.

  The cloud drifted away. Red bones sank through water. The grendel gnawed at them, and was still hungry. Hungry and triumphant. Now she would hunt the shoreline where the lake monster no longer ruled.

  PART 1

  ICE ON THEIR MINDS

  Youth holds no society with grief.

  EURIPIDES

  Chapter 1

  THE RETURN

  The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

  JAMES BRANCH CABELL, The
Silver Stallion

  "What in the hell is that?"

  Jessica Weyland heard the words without recognizing the voice. It originated just outside the stone walls of the Hold's guest bathroom, where she was scrubbing her cheeks with ice-cold water piped from the Amazon Creek.

  The bath was part of the Hold's guest suite, attached to a guest bedroom that had been hers before she built her own place at Surf's Up. Toshiro Tanaka, her previous evening's entertainment, still sprawled unconscious across the bed. Sleep-cycle incompatibility prevented them from having anything but an occasional fling. Too bad. Like many a musician, he had such good hands...

  "Frozen bat turds! Will you look at it?"

  Jessica ran toward the living room before thinking about what she'd heard. Her long, deeply tanned and muscular legs ate the distance between bedrooms and living room in their nine long strides. Her mind flew faster than her feet. Kids paying us back for last night? Gotcha? No. They'd be pretending horror, not astonished curiosity. No, this is something else.

  Jessica was tall and blue-eyed, as Nordic as a glacier, with shoulder-length blond hair, high cheekbones, and a large, cool mouth. She moved like the athletic animal she was. The muscles in her calves bounced with every long stride. She was unself-consciously naked: there had been no time to grab a towel.

  Her father, Cadmann Weyland, Colonel Cadmann Weyland, had built the Hold as a fortress against monsters even before he understood the grendel threat. The others called him paranoid and worse, even accusing him of faking a threat as part of a power grab, even a military takeover of the colony. He left them then, and built his home on a high ledge, digging into the side of Mucking Great Mountain. Most of it was underground: cool in Avalon's winters, and warm in her summers. Light slanted in through the Hold's louvered ceiling. The living room was Paradise.

  A green-tiled channel grooved the middle of the living room. The glacial Amazon ran through that, right through the living room, a foot deep and four feet wide. It had once been deeper and narrower there, but Jessica didn't remember that. It was another of those facts she had been told, and which she believed in the same way that she believed there was a solar system with a yellower star and a planet named Earth.

  A gently sloped tile shelf ran along part of the stream. The rest was fenced off by a hedge that grew along the edge of the running water. The hedge was composed of plants from both Camelot Island and the far reaches of Avalon, so that the room was as much aborted and botanical garden as living space.

  Fully half those weirdly shaped plants had thorns and spines. They weren't really cactus, but resembled cactus more than they did any other kind of Terran plant. Avalon plant life needed protection. Any defenseless life form was instant grendel chow. Some plants had other protection: the violet-petaled beauties with acid resin, tiny deep blue fruiting bulbs with astonishingly active poison, carnivorous lilies that could turn a frog-sized creature to a husk in forty-eight hours. The garden grew more lethal over the years as the children of Cadmann Weyland's Hold grew more able to cope with them. The plants came from everywhere—Camelot Island's highlands, offshore islands, even the mainland, all brought here to line the stream—and despite the garden's lethality it was beautiful.

  From her earliest days Jessica thought the Hold was the most wonderful place in the world. At present Cadmann, Mary Ann, and Sylvia were in the southern thorn forests hunting specimens. The Hold and Cadmann's Bluff itself were Jessica's and Justin's for the next day and a half. A safe place despite the garden. A perfect place to begin the initiation of the Grendel Scouts. Later they would be taken to the mainland for their real coming-of-age. There were neither serpents nor scorpions in this paradise.

  So who was doing all the yelling?

  She was opening the front door when she saw it behind her. Something emerged from the downstream edge of the Amazon's emerald streambed. It wriggled under the lip of the living room's southern, downhill wall to come right into the Arboretum. Something alive. Something thick-bodied and powerful. Its head reminded her a little of a horse's, only stubbier. It pushed its way farther in. The head melded into a broad, powerful neck that grew longer, and longer...

  A voice behind her said: "Hot damn! It's an eel!" Toshiro knelt by the side of the Amazon to watch as the beast worked its rubbery length against the current. It splashed cold water on Jessica's bare feet as it moved past. It ignored them completely. Eventually the entire creature emerged into the living room, fully sixteen feet long, and as thick as a horse's upper leg.

  The front door slammed open, and two panting children ran in. One of them was a small dark girl, Sharon McAndrews. She brandished a sharpened stick. Her mouth and eyes were wide as she watched the eel wiggle sinuously toward the living room's upstream opening. The other, a fourteen-year-old redheaded, freckled lad named Carey Lou Davidson, gawked at Jessica's chest before reluctantly returning his attention to the eel.

  "Stay back," Jessica said quickly. She turned to Toshiro. "Hey, keep an eye on that thing, and watch the kids. I'm throwing on some clothes."

  "But what is it?" Carey Lou asked.

  Toshiro laughed. "I think that Mrs. Eel is just trying to get upstream."

  "Spawning grounds?" Jessica asked.

  He nodded. "Remember Chaka's biology lecture last month? The ecology is returning to Camelot now that the grendels are gone. This will be part of it. Hot damn!"

  He was hopping on one leg, pulling his pants on, risking intimate injury in his enthusiasm. Jessica was already halfway to the guest bedroom.

  She struck the room like a blonde whirlwind, sucking up shirt, pants, and thong sandals without a moment's pause. She was back in the living room before the eel disappeared uphill through the northern wall.

  There was a change in the location of the general hooting outside. Jessica exited, pulling on her blouse, neglecting the buttons but knotting the corners together into a makeshift bra. She almost collided with Justin.

  "What do you see?" Jessica was already running.

  "It's heading right up the hill. Did Dad leave any of the holocam stuff?"

  "Ice on my mind! I didn't check."

  Justin took off up the hill. She swiftly overtook a mob of shrieking Grendel Biters. "Stay away from it!" she shouted.

  "It won't hurt us," Sharon McAndrews said. "It can't, it's too slow."

  "You never saw anything on speed," Jessica said.

  "No legs," one of the children shouted.

  "Yes, all right, but stay away from it anyway, we don't want to scare it." She'd seen the videos of samlon growing legs to become grendels, but that took hours, it couldn't happen in a minute. Still—"Stay away from it."

  With an ear-numbing burr, Skeeter VI buzzed up over the edge of the bluff. Jessica turned and shaded her eyes to look into the windscreen. Evan Castaneda, clean-cut, classic Latin features, was at the helm of the silver-blue autogyro. Coleen McAndrews, fifteen but looking much older, sat in the passenger seat, holocam clipped to her right shoulder.

  Jessica waved Evan down. The skeeter dipped and buzzed, as if intoxicated by flight.

  She hopped onto the runner at the skeeter's side, twined the seat belt around her wrist, clipped a safety line to her belt, and gave a thumbs-up.

  With gut wrenching speed Skeeter VI rose two hundred feet above the house and hovered. From this perspective, Cadmann Weyland's ranch was a miracle of human effort. Rows of soybeans and corn and alfalfa checkered the bluff, and pens for pigs and goats and the small, furry Avalon native marsupials called "Joeys."

  Beneath them, the Amazon sparkled in a silvered ribbon, just catching the morning sun. Alongside it raced a stream of children who laughed and urged one another to greater effort. Justin was well in the lead.

  "Can you see it?" Evan yelled above the turbine whine.

  The sunlight glinted off the stream. She thought she caught a slender shadow, but...

  "Not yet."

  "Try these." Coleen handed her a comm-link optical set: binoculars with cameras linked to the colony's central computer system. "Cassandra. I'm turning the war specs over to Jessica."